Inside Health

Grant Aims at More Healthful Crops

By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: October 21, 2003

For about a decade, a project called HarvestPlus has been promoting an idea for fighting malnutrition in the third world: develop crops with higher levels of vitamins and minerals. Now HarvestPlus will get a chance to put its plan into action. It received a $25 million grant last week from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation giving it the money to jump-start its effort.

The approach represents ''a new paradigm of agriculture as an instrument for public health,'' said Joachim Voss, director general of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, an organization involved in the HarvestPlus program. The first goal will be to increase levels of iron, zinc and vitamin A in third world staple crops like rice, wheat, cassava and beans.

The United Nations estimates that nearly one person in three in the world suffers from deficiencies in so-called micronutrients like iron and zinc, contributing to developmental problems in children, disease and death. Iron deficiency is responsible for 100,000 maternal deaths in childbirth each year. Vitamin A deficiency causes hundreds of thousands of children to go blind annually, and lack of zinc makes people more susceptible to infectious diseases.

Efforts have been made to provide nutrients by distributing vitamin pills or by fortifying food in processing, by adding iodine to salt, for example. But these efforts tend to reach people mainly in urban areas.

Putting the nutrition in crops themselves, an approach called biofortification, is ''a way to reach the rural populations,'' said David Fleming, director of global health strategies at the Gates Foundation.

Howarth Bouis, an agricultural economist who directs HarvestPlus, said biofortification could be cheaper than vitamin supplements because once seeds were developed, they would cost farmers no more than their regular seed.

He said the program would mostly rely on conventional plant breeding rather than on genetic engineering because it would cost as much as $10 million to get each genetically engineered crop approved in each country. Still, he said, HarvestPlus will do research in genetic engineering because the technology may be used to create some crops that cannot be developed by breeding.

An example, he said, is golden rice, a genetically engineered crop with higher than normal levels of beta carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. The crop, still years from being ready for use, has been the center of controversy, with companies pointing to it as an example of the potential of biotechnology and biotech critics portraying it as more of a public relations tool than an effective remedy for malnutrition.

The foundation's grant will allow HarvestPlus, which has been subsisting on a shoestring budget for nearly a decade, finally to get off the ground.

Historically, Dr. Bouis said, organizations that give money for health are not interested in agriculture and those that finance agricultural research are interested in improving yields, not nutrition. Some scientists said crops bred to have higher nutrient levels would have lower yields, making them unattractive to farmers.

''It's been a very hard sell,'' Dr. Bouis said.

The World Bank is contributing $12 million to the effort and the United States Agency for International Development has given $2 million. HarvestPlus is run by two agricultural research centers that are under the auspices of the World Bank: the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington and the tropical agricultural center in Colombia.

Dr. Bouis said it could take 8 to 10 years for the effort to have a major effect on public health, though some crops might be ready sooner. Indeed, he said, a yellow sweet potato that can provide vitamin A was found in a seed bank and is already being introduced to Africa, where people normally eat white sweet potatoes lacking in the nutrient.

HarvestPlus will strike alliances with seed and biotech companies, in part to help distribute the seeds, Dr. Bouis and other officials said at a news conference last week.

Brian Halweil of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group, said that biofortification was a good short-term solution but that the ultimate answer was a more diverse diet. ''These people are nutritionally deficient because they eat only three bowls of rice a day and nothing else,'' he said.

Photos: The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, above, grows varieties with elevated levels of iron and zinc. Below, golden rice, packed with beta carotene, is shown together with white rice. (Photo by Michael Rubinstein/International Food Policy Research Institute)